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it's not that bleeding edge (the stable branch tend to be wayyyyy behind because the amount of combinason possible with gentoo explode compared to other ditro) but +1 for the learning stuff :)
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Frederic MorinApr 30 '09 at 19:18

Centos for stability - tracks Redhat enterprise, no nasty problems for us in 3 years.

CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible.

On the desktop I use Ubuntu because it goes well with my notebook. On the server I work with Debian and Gentoo (legacy from work). Debian seems pretty stable so I will go with that for my favourite server distro. Also, I like FreeBSD and have worked with it for some time.

Ubuntu is great! Easy to set up and use. Although for quite a few of my servers we use Red Hat Enterprise RHEL (CENTOS paid version) because of the inclusion of SELinux and the added security it provides.

For the desktop I would have to say it's the new version 9 of Ubuntu that I am currently using to break my current record of staying away from Windows for the longest amount of time which is currently 1 day :(.

For the server I like to use a clean Debian install and build up from their adding the packages I need for each build.

I suggest Fedora(FC 10) for a Development Environment as well as Server Environment.
As it has yum to download and install the packages such as PHP, Mysql , PHPMyAdmin and lot more. It will automatically installed and we are ready to start work on.

Debian has aptitude and apt are there advantages?
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ThomaschaafMay 1 '09 at 17:32

I use Fedora (currently 10) on all my desktops, and I love it. But I would never, ever run critical infrastructure on Fedora. That's what CentOS / RHEL are for. Fedora can simply not guarantee secure and stable software because its goal is to be a forerunner, to closely track new and (as of yet) unproven software. On a server you want stable, proven software.
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Mihai LimbăşanMay 2 '09 at 6:32